Productivity

I noticed two articles in the NY Times this morning that pressed my email theme button. The first was actually from yesterday – Lost in E-Mail, Tech Firms Face Self-Made Beast **. The second was In the E-Mail Relay, Not Every Handoff Is Smooth . Both are interesting, but relatively light weight articles. That’s not really a surprise since they are aimed at the mainstream public instead of Joe Techie. There are a few fun things in Lost in E-Mail … such as the new and exciting “Gmail E-Mail Addict” feature that lets the user take a 15 minute break by hitting a button or a neat program called Rescue Time which tracks how much time you are spending in different applications (I used it for a few weeks until I got bored of seeing how much time I was spending on email.) However, neither really gets at the core of the issue they are addressing, which is something approximating “how can human beings deal with the current onslaught of email?” ...

In my I Love Email post, I got a wonderful comment from my friend Fred Wilson that said: to each his/her own these days. my kids use facebook and text messaging for the most part but now that they have email on their phones (bberry and iphone) they use that as well, but it’s not their primary messaging system. i still use email as my primary method, but as someone else said, it’s the new snail mail. i hate doing it and its a chore. i called it “homework” on twitter today. that’s how i feel about it. i find text messaging and twitter are best for me, but they will only be better for a while. they will get more noisy and i’ll have to move to something else. i don’t use facebook messaging at all. when people send me facebook messages, they are talking to a black hole ...

Email. Email. Email. My partner Chris Wand just put up a post titled Did Darwin Skip Over Email? Every now and then the “Email is dead” meme makes the rounds and lights up TechMeme. The right answer isn’t that “email is dead”; it’s that new and exciting stuff is happening around the use of “messaging” and it’s time for some new innovation. For those of you who suggest that I switch all my email over to Facebook, I say to you “Laugh-a-while you can, Monkey Boy.” ...

I spend plenty of time making connections between people. Email has certainly made this a lot easier. One of my best friends – Warren Katz (the founder / CEO of Mak Technologies) recently send me some prehistoric emails that he had saved from me demonstrating that even when I was in my mid 20’s, I was using email to connect people. Note the Compuserve email address – can you remember your Compuserve (or Source) address? And yes – the Compuserve address bounces now. ...

Eh – shitty metaphor. But Bill nails it in his Dear Microsoft: Please Buy Plaxo post. I don’t have a nickel in Plaxo, but this has been an obvious fit for a lot of years. Hopefully someone at Microsoft is listening. While they are at it, maybe they can build a file format autoconverter into Office 2003 SP4.

I’ve periodically engaged in the debate about who actually owns your email. The assertion that email sent from your corporate email address is owned by the company is a difficult one for me to deal with, especially since email has become a ubiquitous means for communication. As a result I find the entire thing tiresome – but important. I’m a big believer in private property rights. I also know the risk of the government granting a property right inappropriately (for example, the evils of software patents .) Today, the New York Times reported that The National Labor Relations Board Restricts Union Use of E-Mail . ...

Upon my return from a week off the grid, I was slaughtered by Facebook invites, LinkedIn invites, and an endless stream of unread blog posts. It only took me 75 minutes of my morning routine to get through all of them. The most entertaining ones had parallel structure to them: “you are my friend on Facebook – I thought we should be friends on LinkedIn” “you are my friend on LinkedIn – I thought we should be friends on Facebook.” Of course, if I hadn’t turned off email reminders for both services I would have also had email messages alerting me to my new almost friends. ...

Pete Warden has a good post up titled Google, Yahoo and MSN Mail APIs . In it, he points at the various “sort of APIs” that are “sort of public.” Later that day, in response to Pete’s post (not really) Google released the Google Apps Email Migration API . Progress. Deva Hazarika – who runs ClearContext – followed with a post titled The three I’s of “Inbox 2.0” where he suggests the issue isn’t the inbox, but the address book. Finally Matt Blumberg, who attended the top secret email meeting that was at Fred Wilson’s office last week, finished us off with In Search of Automated Relevance where he talks about “the channel of communication.” ...

I’m sitting at the W Hotel in Union Square as Amy packs up. We are finally heading home to Boulder after being on the road for 10 days. We had an awesome time this week in Manhattan – one of our favorite cities away from home. But – we are both fried from full days and awesome dinners / late nights. Plus, our pants are tight. Earlier this week I had a fascinating couple of hours with some smart friends talking about email. Two hours later, we had a lot more questions and things to think about. Some of the thoughts are up on the blogs of Fred Wilson , Tom Evslin , and Jeff Pulver. Fred’s insight that we are really taking about “messaging”, not “email” is an important one. ...

If you are following along at home, a gang of us are getting together in NY today to discuss email. Tom Evslin – one of the gang – has a blog post on his pre-meeting thoughts titled Thinking Aloud . I just read a pile of stuff about email in Slate including The Death of E-Mail . Don Dodge (who I should have invited to this meeting) and I have had a fascinating exchange (pun intended) about this over the past few days. This will undoubtedly be a interesting meeting.